If you are a fan of the Jennifer Matt workflow series, which I am, you know that she has a trunk full of stories of companies who have built workflows only to discover that what they built doesn’t work for their needs. The good news is that Jennifer has a lot of expertise and can help. I bring this up because in this series the spotlight has been on how the software you select and implement directly impacts what you can sell, your production capacity, and your profitability.

If you lack a well-defined sales process, your sales teams may be selling things you don’t have the capacity to produce in your current environment. If you lack a view of your customers’ buying patterns, your team may be missing opportunities. If you lack processes that automate as much of the on-boarding of the work as possible, you may be leaking money that could be going to your bottom line. The same is true on through the rest of the workflow touchpoints. The key is process definition and as much automation as you can muster.

Everything to do with print is part of a manufacturing process, including sales. We don’t often speak of sales workflow, but we should! There is an order of events. There are milestones. There are repeatable and auditable steps from the first point of contact to the order insertion into the production end of the workflow. What are the steps in your sales workflow?